Sunday, December 16, 2007

Hallelujah Chorus Nuns

Change the Juvenile Justice code in Georgia

The AJC has a Q&A with former prosecutor and DeKalb County district attorney Tom Morgan:

A 17-year-old high school student takes a nude picture of his 17-year-old girlfriend and sends it via cellphone to his friend.

Does he realize he’s trafficking in child porn?

Two things I’ve learned from working with teenagers,” says J. Tom Morgan, former DeKalb County district attorney. “Either, one, they don’t know the laws, or two, they don’t appreciate the consequences of their actions.”

Know the laws??? How could they??? Morgan says himself that he didn’t know of the one above until it resulted in child porn charges against both the sender and the recipient of the photo. And what public policy good do such laws serve?

Here’s the lesson we teach - uneven application of the law, there’s no rhyme or reason and happenstance gets you caught:

Q: How do you tell a kid to drive 55 mph on I-285?

A: There is no good answer. Don’t kill the messenger because you don’t like the message. It’s 55. You may be the one busted for driving 70.

I tell the college kids at school that they are our future, that they can accept a system with such bad outcomes or they can go out and fix what my generation has so clearly screwed up!

In the meantime, I support the efforts of JUST Georgia to change the juvenile justice system in Georgia. I’ll do everything in my power to help them.

RELATED: The NYTimes says Missouri has turned its juvenile justice system into a nationally recognized model of how to deal effectively with troubled children:

The military’s “Lie and Hide” enforcement plummets

That’s what Stephen H. Miller calls “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and he points to tonight’s 60 Minutes for this:

Discharges of gay soldiers have dropped dramatically since the Afghan and Iraq wars began, from 1,200 a year in 2001 to barely 600 now. With the military struggling to recruit and retain soldiers, gay soldiers claim that commanders are reluctant to discharge critical personnel in the middle of a war.

Comments Miller, “So much for the argument that gays must be drummed out to preserve the ‘unit cohesion,’ especially among our fighting forces.”

More pandering to paranoia in the guise of public safety

Texas plans to do criminal background checks during emergency evacuations before allowing evacuees to board rescue busses. Er, why?

The idea, according to Jack Colley, is to keep sex offenders and others who may be wanted by police off the same buses used by the most vulnerable during an evacuation: the elderly, disabled residents and children.

“This will allow us to help them evacuate,” Colley said of sex offenders and others wanted for crimes. “We’re not going to leave anyone.”

Oh, how kind of them. They’re going to help the criminals and sex offenders evacuate.

And how, precisely, will they handle that in the chaos of an emergency evacuation?

“We’ll have procedures and we’re not going to advertise what they are,” [Mr. Colley] said.

Gee, golly. That makes the confidence just rise up inside of me!

Via Maggie at Of Counsel, who wonders what the public safety issue really is:

The article doesn’t say this is a response to any incident that’s previously occurred. And given that buses are full of people and people have eyes, it’s not going to be the easiest thing to “vicitmizeâ€Â� a fellow busrider. [...]

They claim they are after only those with outstanding warrants, sex offenders, and parolees. I’m not sure why they’ve chosen these three groups. If you’re evacuating the jail, what are you going to do with a person with an outstanding warrant? Are local police really going to have time to deal with that in an emergency?

Yes, I’m real sure their super-secret procedures will work all of that out.